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Operating with the tagline, "Links are not
answers," intelligent search company Kngine (pronounced “kin-gin”) has launched
beta versions of iPhone and Android applications today.

Working like a combination of Apple's Siri and the
Google Search app, Kngine returns answers to both written and
spoken questions with text, pictures, graphs, and images, as
opposed to links alone. Just don't call it semantic search.
"Semanitc search is a buzzword. The semantic web does not exist
yet," says 24-year-old CEO and co-founder Haytham ElFadeel. Yet, he
says, "Kngine doesn't try to index the web; it tries to understand
it."

It takes this approach because “mobile consumers just
want answers to their questions, not lists of links that may or may
not lead to the answer,” he says.

The platform, although in beta, may have a few
advantages over its immediate competitors. Unlike intelligent
search rival Wolfram
Alpha, Kngine does not draw from a finite pool of pre-defined
answers, but rather works to continuously update its dataset with
new information from the web.

"Kngine is always working in the background, reading
the internet to understand the information that is existing on the
web," ElFadeel explains. "When you ask a question, it will try to
understand what the question is about, and then answer the it based
upon an up-to-date knowledge base."

Another rival, Evi,
often derives answers from Q&A forums like Quora, often linking
to the thread rather than returning the full answer. This means the
question has to have been asked before, and it could be outdated,
he points out.

In its bid to do so, Kngine is stacking up. In a
benchmarking test, the platform was able to answer 5,000 questions
with a 69% accuracy rate, compared to Evi's 51% Wolfram Alpha's
39%. (One-third of those questions came from Evi.com,
TrueKnowledge.com, WolframAlpha.com, Kngine.com, Google.com and
Ask.com, while the other two-thirds came from people who don't work
at Kngine or any intelligent search company.)

Thus far, ElFadeel has built the platform with a team
of 12 programmers in Cairo, after launching the idea as a research
project in early 2009. After seeing results, his initial team
decided to build it into a startup, and built a prototype in 2010.
After winning the Global Entrepreneurship Program competition held
in Cairo in January 2011, they secured funding from Cairo-based
venture capital fund Sawari Ventures shortly afterwards, a few
months after the revolution.

Now, ElFadeel has moved to Palo Alto, as of two
months ago, to promote the application launch and open an office in
DogPatch Labs, where he
will continue to work on the project.

Ironically, ElFadeel doesn't have a computer science
degree, having studied commerce at university. Yet his drive has
made this fact irrelevant. "I've taught myself how to program, ever
since I was 11. Honestly, I don't trust a computer science
education in the Middle East and Egypt," he confesses.

With a similar entrepreneurial spirit, no one at
Kngine is resting. They will continue to develop the app, which
currently offers local search in the US, UK, France, Canada and
Germany, to include more functionalities, launching a version with
global local search in two weeks.

ElFadeel also aspires to add Arabic support to the
app in its next iteration. The app uses the same voice recognition
technology as Siri, making it difficult for some with non-American
accents to be understood when speaking English. Yet in the meantime
while that technology improves, users can type their queries, say
ElFadeel.

If Kngine can help users conceptualize web search in
terms of answers, not just locations, it may herald the dawn of a
different kind of revolution rising from Egypt.